Trent Telenko Profile picture
May 10, 2021 10 tweets 4 min read Read on X
One of the crying shames of academic WW2 history is it's unwillingness to address what we now call electronic warfare.

The Ham radio community is both different & far more useful.

See:

German WW2 ECM
(Electronic Countermeasures)
Adam Farson
VA7OJ
ab4oj.com/nsprog/german_…
Now to explain why Ham radio guys can be a whole lot more useful that academic & archival historians** for EW -- the 2 August 1939, LZ130 Graf Zeppelin flight.

**Note: Every field has it's weak points. Extremely few academic tract historians are radio geeks...
2/
...and being a radio geek is a better skill set for the subject matter than most PhD's not awarded to Dr Alfred Price.

LZ130 flew one of the first ELINT missions ever, against the UK Chain Home system with 25 RF engineers aboard.
3/
along with the engineers, LZ130 had broadband radio receivers covering 2 -100 MHz.

Luftwaffe General Wolfgang Martini thought that the British CH towers might be radar and put together this flight and an earlier on in May 1940.

Neither found radar.
4/
The German engineers believed that Britain was developing radars in the same 100-150 MHz
range as Germany, so the team concentrated on that band.

Up to this point, we are in the "standard narrative" historiography.
5/
This is where Adam Farson being a Ham radio guy comes in for "non-standard" history.

He understands the affect of the Mains cycle or powerline hum.

This hum from the UK power grid played a huge role
6/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mains_hum
...in why General Martini's boffins missed the CH signal.

The Luftwaffe signals boffins picked up pulsed signals of CH modulated by 'mains hum' in the 20-50 MHz range, but discounted these as ionosonde signals or mains powerline hum from the UK national grid.
7/
According to Mr. Farson, the British grid was synchronous.

To avoid grid electromagnetic interference (EMI) interference, the 250 kW peak pulse CH transmitters were keyed from different points on the 50 Hz mains cycle to avoid co-channel interference between stations.

8/
This clever synchronization scheme of the CH radar builders to avoid the UK National Grid's mains cycle/powerline hum from screwing up their radar ended up camouflaging the CH signal from the Luftwaffe radar signals intercept boffins.

9/
Where have you heard that bit of electronic warfare history in the "Battle of Britain" narrative?

Even Dr Alfred Price and Dr. R. V. Jones missed this one.

/End

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More from @TrentTelenko

Aug 19
I've gotten a lot of comments on this thread here and via DM. I'm going to share one from a Cold War gray beard on the engine that powers the FP-5.

"FP-5 is around 4 x Tomahawk in mass.

FP-5 Engine🧵
...With a similar configuration, drag will not be dominated by lift induced wing drag but will form drag which is typical for 500 knots air speed jets and missiles with low aspect ratio wings.

2/
...So a rule of thumb estimate is that you will need around 4 x the thrust of a Tomahawk F107-WR-402 700 lbf (3.1 kN) engine for an FP-5 Flamingo GLCM.

3/
Read 7 tweets
Aug 19
Slowly, with a lot of notice, Trump is morphing into Pres. Biden

This territorial concession malarkey is exactly what the Biden Administration was playing games with in Nov 2021 via an op-ed by Samuel Charap of RAND in the Nov 19, 2021 Politico.

1/
That Op-Ed advocated, in effect, that the US abandon Ukraine to Russia in exchange for other concessions by Russia, greenlighting Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

It was understood in Nov. 2021 era DC that Charap...


2/rand.org/pubs/commentar…
...was Jake Sullivan's totem animal for surfacing ideas of "de-escalation" with Russia.

Former Estonian President Ilves and Prof Stephan Blank utterly shredded the Charap/Sullivan thought balloon.

Seeing Trump revive that Charap/Sullivan thought ballon now is sickening🤮

3/3 Image
Read 4 tweets
Aug 18
The issue for Russia with the FP-5 is that its range makes Russian national air defense practically impossible.

Ukraine can reach facilities on the other side of the Urals and north to Murmansk with the FP-5.

Once Ukrainian drones overwhelm a border SAM battery sector.

1/ Image
FP-5's sent through the drone peak saturation area can 'squirt through into a great empty' low at high subsonic speeds.

Only an AWACS with late production SU-30 with look down/shoot down PESA radars can deal with them.

H/T @DrnBmbr
2/ Image
Furthermore, FP-5's are going to have electronic counter measures (ECM) and counter-countermeasures (ECCM) installed as standard.

The FP-5 will have at least a 24 element CRPA element layout to beat GPS jamming...

3/
Read 5 tweets
Aug 12
Pres Zelenskyy of Ukraine just made an interesting statement:

"Let me give an example from yesterday, roughly like this: the Russians suffer about a thousand losses per day — that’s 500 killed and 500 wounded.

1/
I’m not even counting the 10 prisoners and so on. More precisely, 968 losses for Russia: 531 killed, 428 wounded, and 9 captured.

We had 340 losses in one day: 18 killed, 243 wounded, and 79 missing in action," he said."

2/
500 Russian KIA versus 18 Ukrainian KIA is a 29.5 to one ratio in favor of Ukraine.

Total Russian casualties of 1,000 versus 340 Ukrainian is a 2.9 to one ratio in favor of Ukraine.

3/
Read 5 tweets
Aug 12
Actually, the Soviet Union in the "Great Patriotic War" did suffer worse casualties and win.

It is that fact which powers the "Russian WW2 exceptionalism" myth that Putin used to zombify Russians over 20 years to make suicidal assaults over and over again.

1/
I said something like what Chuck just said about Russian casualties in July 2024.

Chuck now, like I did then, underestimates how powerful cultural conditioning is in making armies able to take horrific losses and continue.

2/
As long a Putin's propaganda keeps Russians believing they are winning by taking miniscule slivers of Ukrainian land.

The Russians will keep coming.

It doesn't mean Russia will win. It means Russia is paying a disproportionate blood debt which will have to be paid.

3/
Read 17 tweets
Aug 11
The map below underlines a real innumeracy issue with lots of Western analysts of Ukraine's OWA drone strategic bombing campaign.

BLUF: 40,000/52 weeks is ~769 Ukrainian OWA drones launched a week on average for the whole year.

Ukrainian OWA Drone🧵
1/
Historic war mobilization production curves are heavily back loaded.

That is, the production rates of B-17's and B-24's bombers in the 3rd quarter of 1943 versus the 3rd quarter of 1944 showed a much higher production rate in late 1944.

2/ Image
Image
We are mid-way through the 3rd quarter of the 2025 where Ukraine's OWA drone annual production goal was 40,000.

Ukraine should be around 850-950 OWA drones a week in August 2025 and will be close to 1,200 a week in the 4th qtr. of the 2025.

3/
Read 5 tweets

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